Oops. It looks like some Battlefield 3 players may have been banned by accident due anti-cheat multiplayer software Punkbuster. EA issued a very brief statement about the subject today:

"We are investigating an issue of Punkbuster bans that were incorrectly applied to some of our players. Please understand that our game advisors are not able to access or overturn Punkbuster bans, but we're working with our partners at Even Balance to get this resolved as quickly as possible."

The release goes on to offer those who think they may have been banned incorrectly a place to appeal it. If this has happened to you, you can appeal the ban here.

Punkbuster is anti-cheating software for multiplayer developed and managed by Even Balance. EA uses the middleware for its Battlefield series of games - including the upcoming Battlefield Hardline.

Comments

I really don't trust PunkBuster nor two other popular anticheat software: Hackshield and nProtect.

For punkbuster, it installs a service that is running constantly unless you manually disable it, doesn't matter if the game is running or not. It's one of the reasons why I stopped playing APB Reloaded, cause I got tired of dealing with turning it on and off.

As for Hackshield and nProtect, I don't tend to like them cause they don't like software such as Steam's overlay, or AutoHotKey. So running it through Steam tends to be flagged as hacking software.

As for AutoHotKey, I use that for minor things, such as making the mouse thumb buttons be Ctrl+Tab and Ctrl+Shift+Tab in browsers, or Shit+NumPadPlus to be ":" for time keeping. The worse I do is have a auto right clicker for Minecraft setup due to carpal tunnel. Other things I do with it is mainly just remapping keys for games that don't allow for key remapping.

So I basically just use AHK for accessibility.

╔╦═╣Signature Statement╠═╦╗

If you don't like something I said in a post, don't just hit the dislike, let me know your thoughts! I'm interested in knowing everyone's opinions, even when they don't mesh with my own.

It affected Battlefield 4 as well. People were being banned for "GAMEHACK (81568)" at random.

In fact, on Saturday, nearly 1,000 players were banned in a span of one hour - which is a red flag considering that it made up the significant majority of the 1,360 bans in a 30 day period. Most of those bans appear to have been cleared, however, as it is now down to 390.

The disgust of the situation are the extremist comments on both sides of the fence in social communities such as reddit, especially those who deride people who were affected (with absolutely no benefit of the doubt given).